makeupartist — Blog — Denyelle D. Beauty

A year ago I had a dream...a vison if you will, about doing a photo shoot which featured beautiful brown women having fun. That vision /dream gave me the idea to do "Curlfriends in the City" . So, I reached out to one of my photographer friends Melena of MShonell Photography ( www.mshonellphoto.com) with the concept; lucky for ME, she was down. Fast forward, we did a model call, and snagged 5 beautiful women of color. We did the shoot in the U St corridor of Northwest D.C., and "Curlfriends in the City" was a success!! We were featured on blogs, and were reposted many times.

AAAaaannnnddd...

*drumroll please* This year we were published in the 1st edition of Color Story Magazine!

Exciting right!?

With the unexpected success of "CITC"* shoot, it was hard to find a concept to top it. I knew we had to " bring it" with the next shoot.

Then...

One day, while scrolling my FB timeline, I got wind of the County Fair coming to town. After my discovery I quickly realized we had about two weeks to plan and prepare to execute the shoot.

Knowing Melena wanted to shoot at the fair, my immediate text to her was- "WE HAVE TO SHOOT CURLFRIENDS AT THE FAIR!!! What is your schedule??"

We HAD to act fast because the fair was only in town for one weekend, which, for me, meant I had to carefully and strategically execute EACH detail...we locked down a date and time and I had to start with the planning.

Model call was tough...I needed at least 4 women of varying skin tones to pull off my vision and I was receiving images of the same tone..BEAUTIFUL women nonetheless, but I needed a variety.

Then "voila" everything came together...I ended up with 6 models...which meant work for me as the MUA, Stylist, AND creative director...No sweat right?? Nah, no sweat, I got this!

Deep sigh...

I decided this time we would be colorful so the outfit colors you see were chosen by me accordimg to each model's skin tone. Makeup had to be soft glam on the eyes with a popping bright lip to coordinate with their clothing.

KNEW I wanted them to have big fun, eat fluffy cotton candy, win cute prizes and laugh until their bellies hurt...but I didn't think of the crowd. OMG...ya'll when we arrived...I cringed "what about the crowd??". How in the world can we do a PHOTOSHOOT at the fair with this HUMONGOUS CROWD???

Let me just say this...My GOD is AWESOME! with the exception of one rude game worker, we had a smooth shoot! People were surprisingly respectful of the models, and some were even giving lovely compliments to my ladies.

All in all we had a bunch of fun, and I am extremely proud of this colorful fun-filled shoot.

A HUGE thank you to photographer Melena DeFlorimonte (MShonell Photography) and my beautiful models Joy, Catherine, Terri, Mischelle, Krystle and Denise for making this shoot better than what I could ever imagine!